


Voices on the Wireless

by verilix



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Community: sherlockbbc_fic, Dystopia, Gen, No Spoilers, Writing Exercise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-10
Updated: 2012-06-11
Packaged: 2017-11-07 10:46:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/430212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verilix/pseuds/verilix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dystopian London, ruined and broken, but not ground down, not quite yet.</p><p>(No spoilers for Season 2, or Season 1 for that matter.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Voices on the Wireless

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally on fanfiction.net, but there have been some changes for this new version so this isn't going to be going up all at once. 
> 
> Warning for weird writing style. Specifics fly out of the window.
> 
> Inspired by a kink meme prompt, found here: http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/12432.html?thread=64629904#t64629904

The world has gone to hell.

There’s no police force out on the streets, now – there’s nobody left to pay for it since the government and the Royal Family went into seclusion three months ago along with all their 'experts' and their families. Everybody suspects but nobody will say that they've gone into hiding and abandoned the world to its own sick self-cannibalism. One stayed, it's said, one man of the government, one man who _was_ the government, who stayed behind to try and fix the world, but failed. There's no speculation how, but there was a corpse on London Bridge for a week that people didn't look at, didn't touch. Why would they, when every night there's another fire, another lost child crying in the night, another gang war taking another ten-fifteen-twenty victims. There’s no-one left to fix it, to stop it, now.

The phone networks are down, the internet is inaccessible, the world’s voice is caught up in screaming. Planes no longer fly overhead, helicopters are nonexistent, and cars no longer clog up the roads except for those belonging to the biggest and baddest of the petty criminals that have been set loose on the streets

The televisions don't work anymore, either. Neither cable nor satellite channels have been able to get through for half a year, if you were getting the signal at all for the two months before that when the static started getting out of hand. But there was the BBC, that last bastion of an England full to the brim of tea and newspapers and dreams of an empire that isn't any more and wasn't even then, which lasted for four months longer before the news and dramas and talk shows stopped and it began to repeat – a month later it shut down entirely. There's still sound, sometimes, but nobody wants to listen. It's creepy, somehow, listening to Doctor Who – that's the one that gets through most often, the fans can see the irony and the rest of them don't care – as the audio tracks leak and seep out onto the airwaves. It's painfully, viscerally wrong, listening to a saviour who isn't real and isn't coming.

The people of the city are shattered into personhood, stripped of all ties – a freedom that terrifies, that promises no safety or stability or survival. Nobody dares catch a neighbour’s eye, nobody dares to trust a friend or believe in family. Blood might be thicker than water, but it thins to air when there’s a chance it will be their own spilled on the ground. Scared and alone they shiver, cold even through the burn of an Indian summer and the bright clear daylight that wears them down to thin and colourless paper silhouettes.

But they are far from silent. The radio survives, loud and repetitive as the last few broadcasters holed up in their stations hopelessly, helplessly call out to their cities and their people with music and rambling and – when they finally, inevitably break – painful sobbing prayers. For a price, it's said in hushed conversations, you can get them to call out a name for you into the air. So many of these sad, forlorn hopes have been listed plainly, baldly, boredly on the wireless and yet people listen still for a name they know, for a call from someone out there. At least, those lucky few with radios listen, those with electricity running through the mains or stored away in batteries.

The cause of it all is hissed in corners, the whisper of a fragment of a rumour of a nightmare, a single, solitary, meaningless name – Moriarty.

They curse by it, now. That's the first step, they say, to godhood.

The last of the autumn leaves are falling when the new voice comes on the air. It's gentle, and warm, and laughs with fondness as it talks about the past and sells hope for the future. There's no name, and nobody can figure out where the signal comes from, but people listen and every district of the city calls back by calling between in soft, hushed conversation, neighbours talking to each other without a knife in their back pocket for the first time in so very long – they answer in their non-answer, in listening and passing on the message that he brings.

_We will survive._

The voice brings with it a wisp of remembered pride. 

The people might not smile anymore but sometimes as the voice offers his fragile hope, there is something that swells the heart. A person is a person is a person, perhaps, and in this time of madness an individual is worth less than they were in times of peace, but together they become a people – a force. And although the memory of chaos has yet to stir, the memories that lie buried in the city start to awaken, and though the people have no words for what comes next, they feel it thrumming in their veins. 

It is a thread carried by wire and wave, stitching the persons in their houses back into the body of the people, back into a city. Behind the words lies the hidden sting of a needle gouging through the skin of a listener, pricking them to thought and action, deftly twisting to secure the thread and dragging them back, an enforced healing of a tortured body, a surgical stitch to save something more than just a life.

Where persons forgot, people remember.

This is London. The rest of the world can go to hell but this is _London_ and it has always been its own master, even before Greater London grew and it could still kick out a king with a lunatic grin of wood and stone and steel.

If you blow up a street it bleeds history, recalls the Blitz and spits it back in your face. If you stab a woman it screams of the Ripper and calls you an amateur for thinking that that could ever give you power over anything. If you set a fire of any size it laughs and laughs and scorches your soul, for not even the Great Fire could turn it to ash. There's nothing you can do to it that hasn't been done before and done worse.

And it has its own bizarre protectors.

Snow litters the ground, thin and dirty and splotchy as the sun rises behind grey clouds when one of those strange defenders talks on the air, voice ringing out in place of the kindly one they've come to love.

"Good morning, London, rest of England. This is Sherlock Holmes. Prepare for the news, and don't worry, I'll speak slowly so you can try to keep up."

And the city – the world – holds its breath.


	2. Song on the Street

Winter was settling in deep and cold as the days were counted down to – what? There was no Christmas now, no generic non-denominational winter solstice festival, nothing to celebrate, nothing to remind the people that things change and the light returns. But.

There was a feeling in the air.

Not quite the same as years before, true – there was far less joy and cheery bustle, not to mention the absence of last-minute panic that accompanies the present-buyer, and the puzzlement that comes with the careful politics of card-sending. Obscene amounts of food would not be cooked for critical relatives and few were planning parties to celebrate surviving yet another year. And still there was a hint of Christmas in the air.

A faint flavour of the fervent excitement and whispered half-prayers of children waiting for the magic of midnight to come; that was one part of it. The shaky jittery junkie feeling of anticipation, of a pounding heart pumping adrenaline through the veins just at the point when a fight is about to break out, that giddy rush of “I’ll ‘ave you mate” and “come on then ‘ard man”; that was a part of it too. As was hope, the last of the evils in Pandora’s Box – called foreboding in some stories, imprisoned in her jar of troubles – all quiet and fluttery, leaving an acrid choking tang on the tongue like a first cigarette, the first in a very long while. The chemical cocktail of “Something Is Coming” draped itself over London; a cloying perfume dabbed on the neck of a city that giggled delirious in the night.

Not everyone in the city had heard the sharp-edged voice that rattled across the airwaves, but enough did – enough to send the message flying through the streets. Just as before, when the gentler voice had soothed them, the news was passed along from hand to hand and lip to ear, a furtive game of Chinese Whispers in an unfriendly playground. 

The news was this:

_Moriarty is human._

And this:

_They are coming for him._

And this:

_You are needed._

From man to woman to child and back, they prepared themselves for what was to come. Those who had chosen to be part of the discord overwhelming the city could almost taste the insolence return, the arrogance and sneering disdain merely an echo where once it was a shout, perhaps, but _there_ in a way it hadn’t been for so, so long. Words were passed among them too; they’d heard the voice on the airwaves just the same and they knew the two were connected. What they didn’t and couldn’t understand was how one man could wake up the dragon of the city; all they could do was feel it stir in the stone and brick and tarmac and wait for it to rise.

Somewhere, out there in the city, out in the world, a man was laughing shrill and pleased, inviting the angels to try their luck against the devil himself.

(But there are no angels in London.)


	3. Riot in the Air

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not entirely sure how cautious I have to be with this chapter, so I'm just going to say this - if you have triggers of any kind, I'd advise reading the notes at the bottom first to make sure there's nothing here that is going to set them off.

When things came to a head, there was nothing as polite as an invitation to dance given to the performers.

Perhaps once upon a later time someone will look back, but the most they would see would be the body of a boy sprawled mangled in the dirt and a woman – mother, sister, aunt, stranger, it didn’t matter now – who swung a fist and felt it connect. The woman died, obviously, but the man who swung his fist for her didn’t. After all, one woman is easy to shoot in the head. Fifty people who’d had enough weren’t. Fifty neighbours, maybe more, maybe less, who lit a flame that London permitted to burn could not be stopped by something as small as a handgun. ‘Community’ might have been a dirty word in a time when trust was a mythical beast lost to stories of before, but ‘mob’ was perfectly happy to take over in its place.

The prancing harlequin of riot and rebellion, of the chaos brewed into the demon drink and of anger steeped in irritation and resentment, its brutish grin spread wide over a mouthful of broken glass, pirouetted and landed where people gathered; its glee spilled out onto the streets like blood and caused red mist to rise and red liquid to flow. London had had quite enough of being oppressed _thank you very much._ Gods and men and monsters could come and try their conquering hand but each and every one would be ground into the dust and dirt beneath every native Londoner’s feet. It had happened before.

The dancer sang out a ceaseless song of calling through his rude reed pipe, and through the concrete and the tarmac and the brick, through the MDF and plastic and steel, oozed the ghosts – the memetic legacy of crime and thoughtlessness and petty revenge for slights both imagined and real. Not the disembodied spirits of people who had lived them, committed them, suffered them, no. The ghosts of the frustrations and agonies themselves, of pain and sadness and indignation, and that eternal question: _why me?_

The pensioner mugged for the change in their pockets, all that was left of a pittance from the government. The mother who saw her child shot as they played. The businesswoman tired of her boss looked at her chest and not her face, dismissing her words with a painfully casual misogyny. The man in the alley, being beaten by yobs for falling in love with another man and the woman raped because someone thought it would make her normal (but they didn’t, it was always an excuse for something more brutal than that). The child called names by their peers for having second-hand clothing, or a stutter, or bruises on their wrists and places that nobody but the inflictor saw, and the people they grew up into shaped by those acts. The barista sick of people on the phone while ordering and everyone stuck in the queue behind the one person who never knew what they wanted when they got to the till. The person left alone, fourteen and impressionable, when their parents were off doing who knew what to survive in a shattered world. The young man who was passed over for yet another job because they wanted to give it to someone a bit less ethnic, who was eyed warily in the street in case he opened his jacket and yelled “God is great!” and who hated people just that little bit more for something so ingrained it was less a thought in their mind and more of a reflex in their brain. Every single person who had ever been stuck behind someone who walked too slowly, or drove too slowly, feeling their legs ache with the effort of shortening their stride.

All the big grievances and small irritations, leaked into the bones of the city from the past days of secure jobs and coffee shops and from the present where might was right and everyone too weak to keep something deserved to lose it, crawled up the throat of the city and let itself loose in an unearthly howl.  
They had a war cry now.

Not that you could hear it over the sounds of smashing windows and the dull roar that accompanies any large gathering of people. Not that it could be heard over the sound of flesh smacking into flesh, over the occasional gunshot, any more than the faint whumph of air from the lungs of someone stabbed not three seconds ago, or the rush of adrenaline-rich blood through the veins. A silent war cry might be a peculiar paradox, but it rang loud in the ears of the Londoners.

_This is ours. Piss off._

Of the seven million eight hundred thousand odd inhabitants left, only the youngest children stayed at home. Perhaps in a kinder time the mothers would have stayed too, along with other sensible people who would watch the riots on the news and blame the government or the schools or the economy or the parents, tutting and sighing and glad of their walls. This was not a kinder time.

Everyone knew who had dedicated themselves to the cult of Moriarty, because everyone remembers the face of the person who holds a knife to their mother’s throat and tells them to hand over the cash (or something else, someone else, for them to play with). Hatred seething and roiling in the sewers of the heart had burned the image of everyone who had used the name to justify their sadistic pleasure or to take what belonged to someone else into the brain. After all – if you hurt a hundred people, all it means is that one day, when they’ve had enough of being your victim and the world decides to wrench itself into a brand new shape, you’ve a hundred people who know your name, a hundred who will run with their fingers crushed into fists for the chance to hurt you back, who will bleed for vengeance.

And blood did run in the streets of London, and the Thames swallowed the bodies of the dead and dying. It was still a better hell than they’d had before.

As the river ran on, time flowed by too. People ebbed and flowed back into their homes and hiding places as the red sun fell, leaving the wounded to fend for themselves and the dead to rot by the side of the road. Clean-up would come tomorrow, and tomorrow would come soon enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a paragraph after the "and that eternal question: why me?" part which lists a lot of grievances and generally not-good events. None of it is explicit, nothing is longer than a sentence, but all of this is present (there may be more that wasn't intentional):
> 
> Non-con; racism, sexism, homophobia, and prejudice in general; abuse to children, old people and in general; death, dying and violence; queuing and people walking slowly.
> 
> If you miss out that paragraph, you miss everything listed here. Except the violence, and some blood.


	4. Waters Washing Clean

When the faint rumours that had caused the downfall of the city coalesced into a man whose suit was free from dust, whose hands were clean of the blood they’d caused to be spilt, nobody was there to see it. No-one who would admit to it anyway, no-one whose presence could be proven.

Three men versus one, and to the never-present watchers tucked far out of sight it seemed almost pathetic. Surely an army was needed to bring down a demon – but the army had been summoned and deployed to deal with other matters equally as pressing. And yet, the demon’s attention had been caught, and what normal men could force a monster to sit up and heed them? 

One grey-haired and tired, resilient all the same with a step that didn’t falter and an unseen burden on his back – a man of the law vaguely remembered from pleas to the public from the police, from a time when people might have listened. The second was short and steady-handed, bags under his eyes heavy and deep but a gaze that didn’t falter – an unknown soldier worn from war, familiarly anonymous. The third as thin as a knife edge, as straight as a ruler against the clouded sky, as though some cruel angel held him taut from their place in the heavens – he was the one the demon looked at, hungry. 

Three men versus a lunatic.

With both sides of the river swamped by the chaos that had consumed the banks, this one still place in between should have been a sanctuary, the quiet voices providing a reassuring counterpoint to the screams and shouts from the city proper.

The never-there observers thought it a matter of time before someone’s throat was torn out with teeth.

The officer of the law, the man like a knife, the worn soldier with the gentle voice – pointless epithets for those who left nameless, given by people who shouldn’t have been there, who should have run when they could – they stood arrayed against the trickster, who was laughing, secure in his immortality. Who could wash this stain from London, who could erase his name from the country, who could scrub him from the world and its history? This was his eternity, and chaos would rain evermore, his gift to the unborn being a world void of mercy.  
Nobody was there, and you can’t prove they were, but if they had been present, they might have thought, fleetingly, fearfully, of other madmen brought to heel and made to beg. 

But the soft voices and silent tension lasted for perhaps three minutes before one man walked away – the one like a knife. The rat of a man, the rumour personified, cried out in dismay and they heard the exchange.

_Where are you going? Is that it? And here I thought you were going to defeat me. Or can’t you face the thought of me dying? The thought of me not being there to provide a challenge? I suppose you’re just one more boring person then, aren’t you, one more stupid ordinary person – and you just need to look around to see what I’ve done to a city full of those._

_I’d be delighted to, actually, but my colleagues and I spoke earlier. Drew lots, even. The law, as they say, will do for you._

The bark of a gun, and rat-man crumpled. The three survivors – survivors of what? No blows were exchanged and yet the _relief_ – took the body and bundled it into the Thames. What more can be said? The riots raged on for a good while after, nothing was made right again in the immediate wake of the execution. 

The river rushed on, unaware of the concerns of the city, content to carry the filth on to the all-devouring sea.

At its core, it is a simple tale. A man stood on a bridge, three others arrayed against him. A shot rang out and down he fell, and that was that.

And yet – 

And yet.

And _yet._


	5. Renewal of a City

The death of the man did not cleanse the world – the death of a man cannot cleanse anything – but it scrubbed a tiny little blot off London and gave the bad a heavy-fisted blow, just enough to give the good a little breather before really getting down to business. The rain that came in the spring couldn’t purify the memories, either, or heal the bruises both visible and not, but it was a symbol in a time when symbols were all people had left to cling to in their ruined little world.

People started up again, like the whole year had been spent asleep. It would take a very long time to recover, everyone knew that, but it was better than thinking about the nightmare that had been and gone. The government came back, in England at least, and it wasn’t long before the static went away (whispers of the devices that brought it on didn’t, though, not for a very long time) and there was news on BBC1 again. It was only six months before they had HD channels and cable, though it took a year and a half for them to stop showing repeats.

_Doctor Who_ went off the air until the efforts of the Royal Mail began again and the internet came back online, at which point there was a flood of petitions demanding it back.

Apparently... well, a symbol for a shattered world, a metaphor and a wish and a lonely god. Does it really need saying?

The police force came back, not the crippled thing that had fed from a dead man’s hand before dissolving under the weight of its own corruption, but the boys and girls in blue, officers and representatives of the Law. It was a little embarrassing, really, when they went to the houses and asked if there had been any bother. Only embarrassment, though – nobody could spare the effort to resent people for doing what they would have done themselves. The small-time criminals who had kept their heads down and the big-time criminals who had had the sense to flee didn’t return, didn’t stick their heads out of their lairs for quite some time. The few who did were found dead or worse, and nobody sought justice for them.

And as for the three on the bridge (the three wise men as some wags started calling them) they just melted away into the jostling crowds of London. It wasn’t all that surprising. People found it easier to forget the horror if they also forgot the heroes.  
But as someone once said (and who, I’ve forgotten):

_Heroes don’t exist – and even if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them._


End file.
